After the success of "The World is Flat", Friedman turns to the negative effects of the globalization; the global warming and its the chilling consequences in his new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded - Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America". He makes an argument that America needs a big problem to re-motivate itself. It was a dominant force in the industrial and information era. But as the world gets hotter -- due to greenhouse emissions by increasing spread of the technology, flatter -- due to IT and communications revolution and crowded -- due to population growth, America needs to provide leadership in providing sustainable solutions to the world.

The book gives a good insight into the global warming. Though I have been aware of the term, it was eye-opening because of the different examples and quotes. Friedman proposes many ideas, some of which are intriguing. e.g. establish a floor price of $5 per gallon on gasoline for next N years. This will motivate the alternative energy industries to accelerate their development of their technologies. (He also argues the government will get benefited (because of the tariff collected), but that point is debatable, because the oil-producing nations will immediately bump their prices up to extract the profits). He also dreams up some scenarios of energy technology companies coming up with energy dashboards to help you monitor and optimize your energy usage. There are some examples of how going green helps the US military gain an upper hand. (It seems a lot of money is spent by the military in air-conditioning! By building unconventional and greener bases, they reduce or eliminate the demand for transporting gasoline to the bases, thus saving money and the lives of people who transport the gasoline!)

Overall, I liked this book a lot. It surely increased my awareness to the global warming and taught me to look at all perspectives (including the negative externalities) of different alternatives.

Some links:

• Here is an interview of Friedman by the funny man Colbert.
• An interview of Friedman by Fareed Zakaria.

Here are the books read in the past few weeks:

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell is about snap judgements (the author terms this as thinslicing)that we make about things, people. It gives a lot of examples where people make judgements about certain objects (e.g. whether a statue is genuine or fake) or people (whether the teacher is good or not). In many cases the judgements are amazingly correct with no scientific logic behind the judgement, but in other cases they are plain wrong. Malcolm has also written about the topic in this New Yorker article. Though the book has a lot of fascinating examples, I found much of the material common-sense and as you would guess there is no positive or negative about these judgements.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is about various things that make you popular among people. As we all find out by experience, people that are most popular and/or make a lot of money are not necessarily geniuses, but they all have very good people skills. Some pieces of advice from the book: Never critisize, Praise (not flatter) people to give them importance, Make people want to do the things that you want them to do, Smile. Overall a good book with a nice conversational style (though the examples given are those of people way out in past - hey, the book was written in 1936!)

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin is about a new way of marketing where the marketer instead of interrupting the consumer, builds a long term relation with him. They offer some goodies in order to get permissions to send messages to the consumers and then they continue offering more and more baits to obtain more permissions. A very good read. Even though Seth works for Yahoo, it seems like their competitor is using his concepts in much more effective ways.

This blog is turning into just a list of books I am reading. Anyway, here are some new books read in last month or so:

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done -- by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (Re-read).

Working with Emotional Intelligence -- by Daniel Goleman - develops the ideas of Emotional Intelligence further and provides practical approach for implementing it. The concept of Emotional Intelligence (to me) is very obvious and I did not have much to take from this book.

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin

Currently reading: Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life -- by David Allen.